by Bobby Adair
Tommy weighed for the hundredth time whether it was time to try for an escape.
What answer would the errand boys bring back from Frank Lugenbuhl? Yay or nay? Life or death? 50-50? Were those really Tommy’s chances if he waited it out? His life bet on a coin toss?
It wasn’t true. None of this was random. He was kneeling on a cliff with armed men behind him because somebody—a lot of somebodies—were so aggrieved about something, they believed this extreme measure was justified. The odds on a favorable decision were not even, but Tommy had no way of guessing what they were.
And running?
What were the chances of making a successful escape just by jumping to his feet and hauling ass for the trees?
Jumping?
Tommy’s wrists were still bound behind his back. His knees were on the rocky ground less than a foot from a deadly drop-off. He was leaning back on his heels, feet tingling from loss of circulation. His only means of jumping up would be to fall backward and roll around like a show-seal at Sea World until he managed to get his feet beneath him. And if the guards were so busy laughing that they couldn't shoot, he'd then have to sprint half the length of a football field with little cover.
By far the most likely outcome of jumping to his feet would be another beating, maybe a concussion, and then the irritated guards might just roll him off the edge for his trouble. And why wouldn’t they do that? Even Kernan, an acquaintance, an educated professional, thought he was some kind of traitor come to take away America's apple pie and baseball.
And not a shred of evidence to prove the accusation.
God, how could people be so misled?
A big gust brought with it another fit of shivering.
Only, when it had passed, the shivers stayed.
Tommy tucked his arms in close to his body and bowed his head, trying to grab his T-shirt collar in his teeth, hoping to work it up over his face so his exhalations would warm his skin.
More wasted effort, but at least it took his mind off the cliff.
Were bodies down there already? Faith and Emma?
Is this what it was like to be disappeared? A confused nightmare until somebody blasted a load of lead through the back of your head for a reason you never understood?
Had America really sank to this, integrity turned to lies, politics turned to violence, leaving what, a Balkan mess? A defunct empire?
Did it matter?
Faith and Emma were dead—probably—and Tommy wasn’t getting off the cliff alive.
He’d wanted so much for Emma to go to college, to get married, have kids of her own, grandchildren for Tommy to bounce on his knee and take to Disney World, and the circus, and even to D.C. to see the monuments and museums.
Tommy’s grandpa had taken him to Washington when he was a kid. That one happy week, that one time he’d been free from Fred—his dad.
When grandpa brought Tommy home from that trip, Fred punched grandpa in the face, right there in the front yard. Fred yelled the bad words as grandpa drove slowly away. Fuck and cunt and faggot. Beating on the fender with his fists. Daring him to get out of the car again. Mom crying just inside the front door. Sam in her room with a record turned up to ten.
After that, Tommy never saw grandpa again.
No surprise. Not by then.
It was a few years before that when Tommy realized something was wrong with his family, with Fred.
Tommy was in kindergarten, maybe first grade, he didn't remember. It was Saturday, so no school, only cartoons on TV while everybody slept in. The light was gray that morning. Slanty, black shadows hid behind the furniture and lurked in the corners. Tommy tiptoed quietly, because Fred had told Tommy twice before that his night job was teaching noisy boys how to cry.
Still, in his jammies, Tommy crept into the kitchen to pour a bowl of O's. He never made it to the cupboard, though. Fred was sprawled on the floor, face pressed to the linoleum, strings of drool dripping on the blue and white pattern. He was snoring, and wearing his work clothes from the day before. He stank of motor oil and chemicals, work sweat, and what Tommy eventually came to learn was alcohol. And evaporating piss. Tommy knew that smell well because sometimes he still had accidents at night, too.
Tommy didn’t run to wake his mom. He already knew he’d have to ‘clean up that goddamned mess you little bastard,’ and he didn’t like it when Fred got angry enough to yell it. So he fetched a moldering dishtowel from the counter by the sink and sopped the sticky spit up off the linoleum. When most of that was cleaned, he dabbed at the snot crusted around his dad’s mouth. Why? He didn’t have a reason, none that he could remember.
It awakened the giant, though.
Fred sprang off the floor, red-faced and loud, “Whaddaya tryin’ to do, suffocate me, you little bastard?”
Tommy answered by wetting his pajamas.
After that, nothing. Until the hospital.
The doctor told him what a brave little boy he was because he hadn’t cried when the stitches were being sewn into his scalp. He remembered his mother with a big bruise on her cheek making up a story about a little fender bender that morning that had never actually happened. That was back before seatbelt laws were a thing. Nobody in the car had been buckled in. So it all made sense to the doctor.
As Tommy got older, he used to wonder about that day. Would things have turned out differently if the doctor had seen through his mother’s poorly constructed lies?
When Tommy was twelve, Fred did go to prison. Not for his million sins and his domestic crimes, not even for the thousand kilos of coke he’d muled all through East Texas and Louisiana, but for the one felony that was finally too horrible to be ignored.
Fred was on probation for a DUI when he met the Russells, a couple with three kids around Tommy’s age. They were on the highway one Wednesday night trying to make the six-hour drive to their grandma’s house for Thanksgiving. Fred, feeling extra festive because of the holiday, decided to tie one on before going home. He’d gotten so blasted he didn’t know he was driving on the wrong side of the road. Even after the accident, as he was sitting in the median, head in his hands, trying to understand why he smelled like piss again, he didn’t realize the Russells and their three kids were burning to death in a minivan rolled over in the ditch.
Off to jail he went.
Sam dropped out of school because somebody had to pay the rent. Tommy’s mom by then was good for little besides staring at the TV and pining for the life she’d wished she’d lived instead. Tommy grew old enough to understand that people were things—like dishes in the kitchen, or favorite toys hidden in the closet, they could be broken and no glue could ever put them back together. That’s how he eventually understood what happened to Sam. She found a drug that helped her pretend the shattered pieces of her soul were whole again. It was a lie. But it worked when she was on it. Meth was her magic.
It took a long time to kill her.
But she was strong, so strong.
That’s not the kind of thing people usually say about addicts, but Sam put herself in the firing line in the family’s war with Fred. She’d protected Tommy from the worst of it, and had saved what was left of their mother. She’d made that choice, every day for years, even after she was plenty old enough to run away and save herself.
As with most people, though, she didn’t understand the cost until later.
When Tommy was older and could earn enough to help her, he did. He paid her rent when she needed it and eventually wound up paying most of her bills. He encouraged her to go into rehab when she would. He went into debt paying for one after another after another, but no cure ever stuck. She was too broken.
And she died.
Tommy got the call on the night before Emma's first day of school when he and Emma's mother were arguing how much debt Tommy was accruing on his sister's behalf. The ironic thing—Tommy was already doing the same for his alcoholic wife.
It was on that night Tommy realized something about himself. Where he’d thought he’d come out
of the family’s war with Fred with only light scarring, he instead had a special little monkey on his back. Tommy was addicted to addicts. They were the only kind of people he knew how to relate to, so of course, he’d blindly married one.
A codependent enabler they called it at those group meetings.
And just like every junkie, Tommy thought he had it under control, but he couldn’t shake his affinity for connecting to life’s broken people.
When he finally decided to cold-turkey his addiction by divorcing Emma's mother, he found Faith. Not church faith, but a woman. Sure Faith drank, not to any degree that alarmed Tommy. She smoked weed from time to time, but then again, not so often that it was a matter of concern. She was a prize, normal and pretty. She liked to laugh, and she was passionate about things that seemed important, at least in the flurry of news-speak she swirled them in. It wasn't until after they'd been married for a year that Tommy realized his mistake. Not in marrying Faith, but in not seeing she was the next of a type.
Faith wasn’t a slave to a chemical, though. Her addiction was behavioral.
She could spend an entire day in front of a television breathing in the talking-head noise, inebriating in the toe-curling political flow. Spin. Dissect. Analyze. Debate. Commercial break. Repeat.
Cum.
She argued on the internet with strangers and old acquaintances. She shouted at town hall meetings. She put signs in yards to get out the vote. And she was neck-deep in local politics, though she had no desire to run for office, ever.
Her addiction was annoying, but not unhealthy.
At least until she was added to a violent extremist’s do-list. And that had gotten her killed.
And Emma.
And now him.
And that's precisely what was going to happen. All because of politics. Had Tommy only possessed the good sense to marry another alcoholic instead, another needy woman who drank more because he was always so damned emotionally unavailable, he might be squeezing his budget to cover another rehab bill instead of kneeling on the edge of a thousand-foot cliff waiting for a counterfeit patriot to put a bullet in the back of his head.
***
The sky to the east was splashed red and pink by the sun from just under the horizon. Far below, the foot of the cliff curved into a bowl surrounded by jagged rocks, filled with emerald water. Downhill from there the trees grew tall, carpeting a steep valley in pines and aspens, spruce and hemlock, and hiding it all in deep shadows. It was one of those valleys in the mountains that was just too far away and too hard to get to for anyone to pave a road through or sprinkle with million-dollar mountain hideaways nestled in the trees.
It was so close, but so dangerously unreachable.
It was where Tommy wished he was, down there walking free among the warm trees, not perched on a cold cliff, sitting on cramped legs, with a face numbed past sensation, and shivering so much it hurt his bones.
An engine strained. Wheels spun on shale. The groan of a rusty truck frame floated up the mountain behind him.
Again.
Enough hours had passed. The pickup Dr. Kernan had sent down to Spring Creek was crawling its way back, carrying Tommy’s fate in the mouths of five men who’d just as soon shove him off the edge of the cliff as freight him to some other detention site.
The truck’s shaky old machine sounds faded away.
Again.
Lost to the wind. Or trees. Or topography. Or maybe resignation, the same kind that had finally wrung the enthusiasm out of the cries of those lined along the cliff.
And like those cries, the engines sounds didn’t come back.
The silence stretched on.
And on.
Tommy thought that was odd.
***
Many, many long minutes ticked away with no one to notice their passing.
Except for Tommy.
He listened for the messenger truck as the sun toiled over the horizon, shining harsh and cold on his face.
Morning birds tweeted.
Chipmunks chattered.
The wind swayed the lodgepole pines this way and that.
The intensity of the chill quaked Tommy’s body like nothing he’d ever felt before, and he started to believe the cold might kill him if he didn’t do something soon to save himself.
He glanced over his shoulder.
The guards were bored.
Two were standing behind Tommy by a dozen yards, sharing a fruit-scented vape pen and watching the sky turn slowly to blue. Another pair was huddled on a thick log by an old fire pit, hands in their pockets, trying to stay warm under the assault of the wind. Dozing. Some were in the cabs of their trucks, maybe asleep, or just bundled warmly with engines on and heaters running. The rest were behind the parked vehicles, and Tommy was doing his best to make a count of them, to mark their positions, as they bragged to one another about the lengths they’d go to save their country from the Hazelton Nonconformists, and explored the depths of their imaginations for all the things they’d like to do to the NonCons who were trying to drag the country down into the sewer.
If those guys left him a big enough hole, if he could figure a way to slip past the attention of the two nearest guards, he decided he had to try for freedom—spin, flop, miracle himself to his feet, and run.
“Ezz,” Tommy whispered through chattering teeth.
She looked at him. Despite her extra layer of yellow fleece, she wasn’t doing much better with the cold.
“I’m going,” Tommy struggled with the syllables, “to run for it.”
Shivering as well, Ezz said, “They’ll kill you, and throw you over.”
He tried his best to smile. “I’m afraid of heights.”
She laughed with what little humor she had left.
“I’d rather be shot than freeze to death. Come if you want.”
She glanced back at the pair of guards sharing the vape pen. “They’re looking right at us. You’ll never make it.”
“Let’s rush ‘em.”
Ezz shook her head. “And then what?”
Tommy smiled, maybe. His face was too numb to know for sure. “It’s the best I can come up with.”
Ezz looked down the row. “Maybe if we all go at once.”
“How many would take the chance?” Tommy knew the plan was doomed, yet he wasn’t going to wait for death any longer. “Pass the—”
Gunfire exploded across the pasture.
Tommy needed no more distraction than that.
He threw himself away from the cliff, landing on his back, and rolling onto his stomach. He looked right and left to see who was shooting.
Muzzles flashed from the tree line.
The two smoking guards were on the ground.
One of the men from the fire pit log stood for a look. A bullet ripped through his arm, shredding his sleeve in a spray of blood and torn cloth. The other dove for the dirt.
“Ezz,” shivered Tommy, “we gotta go.”
“Trying.” She was on her back, rolling over.
Tommy pulled his knees up to his chest, and wrestled himself upright. He wrenched one leg up and planted a tingly foot on the ground. He couldn’t feel his shoe, his toes, nothing.
The 704 behind the cuddling log found some bravery and raised his rifle to find a target. The target found him first, and his head burst open.
Tommy lost his balance and tumbled over.
Bullets snapped the air as they tore past.
“We give up,” someone shouted but was ignored through the din of gunshots.
“Surrender!” called another, raising a rifle overhead. “Surrender!”
The gunfire petered out.
“Hands in the air,” a woman shouted from off in the trees. “All of you.”
The two guards closest to Tommy looked at one another, deciding what to do.
“You two in the grass,” a man called from the trees on the right. “Do it now, or die.”
Their hands went up.
“Everybody,” the w
oman hollered, “drop your weapons. Get on your feet and march this way.”
“We can’t move,” shouted one of the prisoners at the cliff’s edge. “We’re tied up.”
“Detainees,” called the man from the trees on the right, “stay where you are. Don’t move until we give you the word. You’re safe.”
As relief fought with shivering muscles, Tommy made a guess. “The police found us.” He turned to Ezz with the best smile he could muster.
She was inert. From her head down to her waist, deep red blood was sprayed over the back of her yellow fleece jacket. Her face lay flat in the grass.
Tommy curled himself into a ball, trying to capture the last of his warmth before the wind swept it away. He barely knew Ezz, but his resilience was waning under constant assault. He closed his eyes and tried not to shame himself by crying. Through the violent shivers and the short breaths, he couldn’t tell if he was succeeding.
Voices cast harsh orders.
Feet tromped this way and that.
The sounds of people converged.
Nobody shouted the word, ‘Police.’ Chaos and emotion overruled order and patience. It was clear without even looking up that a change in authority was underway.
A hand came down on Tommy’s shoulder, and the plastic strap around his wrists snapped free.
“Tha…” tried Tommy. “Thank...” He opened his eyes and looked up.
“My God, you’re freezing.” Summer Corrigan pulled her jacket off and draped it over him.
Tommy tried to thank her again, yet no word could work its way through his chattering teeth.
“Don’t you die, you asshole.” She shook Tommy to pull his attention out of his problems. “I know where Faith and Emma are.”
Chapter 7
They weren’t the police.
Nor were they with the National Guard.
They were men and women, regular people, nine of them, volunteers. Tommy decided that’s what they had to be—good people who’d picked up the responsibility for enforcing the law when the officers wearing the badges down in Spring Creek seemed to have abdicated the responsibility.